On July 19, 1962, an Egyptian passenger plane traveling from Hong Kong to Cairo via Bangkok crashed into the Sankamphaeng Mountains in Thailand. All twenty-six people on board United Arab Airlines Flight 869 died, including eight crew members.
At Sawt El Umma, The Voice of the Nation, the task of reporting the incident fell to Nimo, the mysterious young belle who had arrived at the radio ministry a little over a year earlier, and who — some insinuated — was having an affair with the boss.
Nimo was given three hours to compose the text for a three-minute news broadcast. Because they had previously arranged to have lunch at Groppi’s, Nimo spent most of that time with her friend Semsem. And though she did not actually subscribe to Semsem’s view that the crash was proof of an imperialist conspiracy against Nasser’s fledgling airline, Nimo wrote it up that way, anyway. That is: she lied, because she thought it would go down better with her boss, Sameh Khairy, Sawt El Umma’s director.
That week, she was summoned to Sameh Khairy’s office for only the second time. Her first visit had rattled her. She’d never imagined one man could have so much space to himself. Even the room that housed his three secretaries was twice as large as the newsroom where she and six others labored day and night, marking sheets of yellow, unlined paper with indelible copia pencils. She’d been made to wait for nearly an hour. Inside, Persian rugs submerged aureate furniture around an elaborate desk, while, hanging from the ceiling like a bad deed, an oversized crystal chandelier gave the impression of being inside a study at the royal Saraya Abdeen. Nimo registered a subtle difference, though: this wasn’t so much a palace study as a peasant’s idea of what a palace study looks like.
Sameh Khairy had founded Sawt El Umma eight years earlier. A legendary broadcaster, he was known for his melodramatic baritone, at once soft-spoken and impassioned. It could be folksy or imposing as needed. Nimo was distressed to find this familiar voice emanating not from the pensive, personable face she’d always imagined but from the thick bovine features of a bald troll. A peasant who looks like the behim he tends, she caught herself thinking.
In that first meeting, he had admonished her about her husband Amin, a known communist, an enemy of our blessed Revolution, who was locked up in said Revolution’s dungeons. Sameh Khairy wanted her to know that he did not hold her responsible. You have been working here for only two months. Yet in such a short time you have proven yourself to be a credit to the Revolution. That is why I have come to think of you as my little sister. As he said this, his beady eyes were all but popping into her bra. He warned that her association with her husband threatened her livelihood. Your work, your position in society, is on the edge of the abyss.
But this time, to Nimo’s astonishment, as she arrived at the director’s office, the bald man came to the door himself to welcome her in.
— Star, he sang out the English word in a faux-Humphrey Bogart voice, smiling broadly and bowing as he kissed her hand. Superstar!
Nimo’s first reward for her lie was an abrupt promotion — a transfer and official appointment to the State Information Service Press Center, a more vital but less visible part of Nasser’s hydra of hype. A week later Sameh Khairy phoned to say he’d arranged a meeting at the new Shepheard’s Hotel with that renowned genius, Aziz Maher. He’d told the artist all about her, her intelligence and beauty, he said, and Aziz couldn’t wait to meet her. Mainly for fear of sounding stupid, Nimo didn’t ask what the artist might want from her, though Sameh Khairy’s tone suggested that this, too, was a reward, an opportunity she mustn’t jeopardize.
And so the two of them were chauffeured in Sameh Khairy’s state-bought black Cadillac DeVille. Next to her in the lush backseat, his hand patted her shoulder and wriggled down her arm until it came to rest on her thigh. She recoiled, pulling her skirt down, and Sameh Khairy disengaged, coughing as he lifted the little curtain to look out of the window. Saying nothing. She was only mildly surprised when, barely ten minutes after the three of them were seated, Sameh Khairy excused himself with a gratuitous grin, declaring that Aziz Maher could always give Nimo a lift back to work.
Which is how she found herself enjoying the Shepheard’s Nile view with champagne, canapés, and a smile so cool and clear she couldn’t help diving into it. That one was no behim. Aziz Maher was said to be the country’s best-known painter, and clearly master of his craft. Two minutes of doodling with his fountain pen and her likeness materialized on the menu with stunning verisimilitude. That was nearly enough to push her into his thrall. Then he confided that the radio broadcast she’d written, about the plane crash and the imperialist plot, was the most powerful he’d ever heard.
As they spoke, Nimo observed that Aziz Maher’s views were identical with Sameh Khairy’s. He believed in Nasser and his mission, and in the perfidy of his enemies. Or he didn’t believe any of it but pretended to, because it was good for his art and his appetite. Aziz Maher had a potentate’s appetite. Art requires a trouble-free life was his refrain. In any case, he was fluent in French, so they conversed in the kind of Franco-Arabe that Nimo often used with her in times. This put her at ease.
Aziz Maher behaved like a suitor. He was the tallest, whitest, most athletically built suitor she’d ever had. And he didn’t seem to mind that she was already married, or that her husband was a communist, indefinitely in prison.
She agreed to return with him to his spacious Zamalak studio and model for him, which she knew perfectly well was a euphemism for fucking.
His studio was at once the most modern interior she’d ever seen and also somehow Thousand and One Nights-ish. Straight-lined black furniture and whitewashed brick walls hung with ancient-looking draperies and antique smoking implements. Collectibles from all over the world and originals by Egyptians — Mahmoud Said, Tahia Halim, Abd El Hadi El Gazzar — that Nimo was still to learn were among the nation’s greatest artists.
She’s been reclining nude on the low Sudanese divan since he undressed her, revealing her orange-tinged topography, rubbing and kneading, adulating her. Nimco felt like some scaled-down odalisque dragging on a sebsi — isn’t that what these long Moroccan kif pipes are called? — which Aziz refilled with tobacco and soft hashish. He squats a few steps away, shirtless, pressing a twig of charcoal into a huge sketchbook.
— Voilà! Do you like the incense, ya amari?
He called her amari. Not ya amar but ya amari, making it his.
She did. Love the incense, that is. But why does she want to laugh? Things are blending into each other: sandalwood into chocolate; the long clay pipe into a rubbery erection; sweat-streaked stubble and sooty fingers into orange blossom and baited breaths. She’s not sure whether this is the hashish, Aziz, or Jacques Brel. She’s always loved Jacques Brel. It’s as if “Ne me quitte pas” were playing not on Aziz’s space-age gramophone but issuing from some tiny speaker inside her head.
A savoir comment
Oublier ces heures
Qui tuaient parfois
The words, the notes are microscopic fish swimming in and out of her pores. Like Aziz’s sweat, everything smells slightly of sea salt. But although she feels like she is underwater, Nimo begins to fly — the fish, the muted sounds, his tongue in her crotch, have transformed her into her favorite bird, which she only knows by its onomatopoeic Arabic name, hudhud.
Her beau chignon is a spray of dark-tipped golden feathers, her ass a magnificent blast of black and white plumage. When she opens her mouth what comes out is oodoodood, oodoodood, oodoodood.
Perhaps that’s why Nimo barely notices the burning ache in her backside. All her life Nimo has suffered from constipation. The worst is when you’re beyond the point of no return but unable to finish because of the pain — which is, she realizes, exactly what she’s feeling now. Suddenly she can smell neither sea salt nor orange blossom water but something ferrous and tinged with — with shit, actually?
As her hazel irises swivel about and her body shakes with the effort of sitting up — Aziz, mistaking this for excitement, intensifies his stabs — Nimo perceives that her knees are above her breasts, a thin string of blood trickling down her legs, staining the cushion a purplish black. She notices that, although her stunted labia are slightly parted, Aziz’s long, willowy penis is elsewhere: halfway up her behind.
When she pushes him off a moment later, gathering her clothes and running out without a word, she encounters not so much resistance as mild shock, a vaguely mocking disgruntlement she can only interpret as the sign of a dissatisfied customer.
Three weeks to the day after she her meeting with Aziz Maher, a charcoal sketch turned up on her desk, sans note, memorializing the moment she became his mannequin. Nimo resolved to thank him, despite the office gossip already in circulation that in addition to serving as Sameh Khairy’s private assistant, she was also, now, one of Aziz Maher’s women — the nubile morsels he needs to consume to maintain his care-free life, whom Sameh Khairy is known to procure for him. She is grateful that no one dares say anything in her presence.
As it happens, Aziz Maher does not make a habit of answering his telephone, and as time wore on Nimo even considered paying a visit to his Zamalek studio. When she finally did get him on the phone, the artist’s manner was so haughty and high-handed as to be laughable. Nimo’s mind flashed back to that moment on the divan when, suddenly aware of exactly what was happening, she tried to make eye contact with her gentleman suitor. But she might as well have been a blow-up doll. Aziz only had eyes for her buttocks, her bezz; his penis, shunting in and out of her bas bas. And he had not the remotest clue that, to her, for the duration of that moment, he is nothing but an intractable turd she is laboring to discharge.
Adapted from The Dissenters (2025) by Youssef Rahka. Courtesy of the author and Graywolf Press
Youssef Rakha has described himself variously as post-muslim, post-political, postmodernist, anti-traditional, anti-aesthetic, anti-everything. The son of a despairing Marxist father and a mother politically devoted, most recently, to Egypt’s dictator-in-chief Abdel El-Fattah Al Sisi, Rakha is a writer who eschews absolutism. After speaking with him some weeks ago, I understood that big ideas had a way of obscuring what was in front of him, rewriting history in service of themselves; big ideas, in other words, are dangerous simplifications. Despite the grainy, unlistenable audio of our conversation, it left an imprint on me.
For Youssef, to be a novelist is to unravel the psyche of his country through the acuity of his observations, his ear for dialogue, and his refreshing disinterest in the manifesto. I am choosing to discuss him as only as a novelist, though he has many other distinctions — father, photographer, poet, translator, contrarian — because Youssef has dared to write a novel of remarkable ingenuity and ambition: The Dissenters.
An unsteady practitioner of any form can intrigue. Think of a tourist-turned-tour guide. Everything is a discovery, but you are both equally ignorant of your surroundings. This is not how one feels reading Youssef. He knowingly employs unsteadiness to render his rickety society in miniature, somehow without abandoning curiosity. The Dissenters is the story of a Amna Abu Zahra, a Francophone Egyptian woman, born in the waning years of the monarchy, who has lived under all of the military men who have governed Egypt since 1952. After attending university and working for a time in the state media, Amna drops out, finding comfort in the Sadat-era’s embrace of religiosity and consumerism. When the January 2011 Revolution breaks out in Tahrir Square, an elderly Amna abandons her faith, becoming an advocate for democracy — only to become disillusioned after the Muslim Brotherhood comes to power. Amna becomes obsessed with rumors of a secretive movement of women who are engaged in an invisible protest; in her final act, she joins them, jumping off a rooftop to her death.
The novel is narrated by Amna’s son, Nour, and is framed as a series of letters to his sister in San Jose. We often find ourselves listening to Amna’s voice anyway. She is inescapable, as many mothers are.
The Dissenters is abundant and circuitous, much like Cairo. Rakha has always been singularly focused on his city. Alternate chapters highlight a single day in Amna’s life; the fragmented narrative stitches together personal and political inevitabilities. Revolution, in this case, is both unrealistic and doomed, though Amna briefly dares to hope. She and many other characters — her son included — oscillate between derision and love for the city, yet steadfastly resist being absorbed into any crowd. (In fact, the crowd in The Dissenters is closer to a cavalcade, emblematic of the novelist’s profuse affinities and the novel’s multigenerational sweep.) In “The Shit,” a story adapted from the book, we encounter a prodigious artist, a lecherous media magnate, and an up-and-coming reporter at the Ministry of Information — a youthful Amna, who is going by Nimo.
In The Dissenters, you, the reader, must delve into the complexities of revolution, despondency, and hope. You become the oppressor and the subjugated. You become Cairo: a tectonic plate, dreaming of an earthquake.
–Zain Khalid